


Push, Pull

by jinlian



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-23
Updated: 2013-08-23
Packaged: 2017-12-24 10:11:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/938722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jinlian/pseuds/jinlian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sokka takes his eldest daughter on a hunt in the south pole; beneath him, the ice crumbles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Push, Pull

He’s afloat in something much vaster than himself—it rocks him, sometimes, a gentle roll or a hard shove against the stones at his side, but always, at least, a reminder that he’s still alive. Each twitch and tug results only in a frozen echo on the ice; he’s learned to stop struggling. Each breath is precious, and every thrum of of blood through his veins and pounding against his skin may be the last time he ever feels it.

Sokka rests his head back against the ice and feels the cold crawling down his back, a shock that trickles along his neck and bites his nerves. Good, he tells himself, good—let it be cold. Let it sting.

It’s silly where he lies, anyway. It takes a lean too far to grab the handle of his boomerang, a patch of ice too thin, and confidence in a home he has not tread in years to throw him down, down into the hollows of ice and trickles that run through, caught only between two crags of ice that keep his upper body above the melted freeze. Of course it’s him, he thinks, even as he yells for Kanani to  _stay back—_ embarrassing. He resolves that this will not be a story to tell Suki when it is over.

_( “It’s home for me, and for them, too,” Sokka says to her. He’ll take Kanani on the hunt, teach her to walk the footsteps of their ancestors of ice and biting wind, to steer a hand-built ship through the tossing waves and stare a polar-bear dog in the eyes. Suki agrees; it is the red stripes of paint and the unagi of **her**  home they will ride next.)_

The chill of melting ice along his spine is the pinpoint of his consciousness, because it means he is not numb. It clings to feeling already lost in his feet, and Sokka bites, too, hard on his lower lip, focusing on the sting of cold and the blood on his tongue. He knows better than to close his eyes, even to taste or feel; so he stares straight through lashes crusted with snow, the sky littered of stars and the waxing moon above the sea. Sokka picks out constellations:  _the Swimming Penguin-Seal, the Wolfbear Cub, the tail of the Rhino-Scorpion._  Light throws itself across the ice and water, humming and rippling where it touches the waves, to drape itself over his face, a wash of white and blue across his skin—“Well, aren’t you eager,” he murmurs, and the world rises too bright and too large against the sky. _I am not lost._ Silver peeks over the twin cliffs that point his way home.

Boots crunch against ice and snow, and he recognizes— _hopes for—_ Kanani’s footsteps. They’re too light for the paws of polar bear dogs, at least. “I don’t know how to find my way,” she calls from above, and he hears the higher pitch and crack in her words.

Something sinks in his chest—only himself in the water, he quips, the rest of him is too numb to tell. It shouldn’t be a disappointment, in the end. Kanani does not know the constellations and the hills of the south pole like he does, and her finding her way alone back to the Tribe for help hadn’t been likely from the beginning, though neither of them had said it aloud. She doesn’t appreciate his joke, either. “I’m going to sit here and you’re going to  _freeze,”_ she reminds him, and his retort that she seems to have  _frozen_ her sense of humor dies on his lips as the water surges around his chest and warmth races to his lungs. 

He struggles to look up at her instead, catches only the sighs of her hands, held trembling over the crevasse. It couldn’t be—but in the dim outline of the night, he believes.

"Dad?" She leans forwards; again, something in the ice shifts and rolls. 

Sokka lets out a  _whoop,_ one that vibrates through the walls of ice and snow, loud enough that could he move he’d slap a hand over his mouth. Kanani scrambles backwards, and Sokka strains, trying to pull himself upright. “Did you feel that?” he asks (quieter now, though his voice high with the effort). “You must have, that— _you_ can do this!”

She stutters a response—the water, again, he tells, her, and she closes her eyes and scoops a handful of snow that melts and pools and mittens and does not trickle from her palm.

_"Breathe,"_ Sokka says, and with her he breathes the rise and fall of the tides, the hiss and murmur of the ocean that hums along their consciousness, the push and pull that crawls along the shores and reach for the feet of the Tribe.

He sees her, at the edge of his vision, curled in the cast of the dim light of the moon that falls around her shoulders and brushes against her hair as she raises a hand that grasps for it in the blackness.  _"Yue,"_ he whispers, a name spoken like a prayer, and then, louder:  _"Pull that plash!"_ Feel the spirit that moves even the tides to crawl further, to reach higher, all in reverence to reach for its lady clothed in white and silver.

The ice melts away, and Sokka is free to scramble, with desperation to feel the flex of his toes against the fur of his salt-crusted boots, onto the snow. Kanani cries in relief, and he throws himself onto his back to stare up before she can join him below. “Ah, _land,_ " he sighs, the thrill of earth even through the ice and slush hard against his back—"I’ll climb up in a moment"—when all the feeling has returned to his feet.

And he does—flops against the still-shaking body of his daughter, curls an arm around her shoulders and kisses the crown of her head. “You’re a waterbender,” he says: a statement that has already made itself, but must be said aloud to be believed. “And this means  _Katara_  gets to get at you with all her spiritual nonsense.” She turns into him, arms wrapped tightly around his chest, and over her head he raises his gaze to the double cliffs of home and the waxing face of the moon.

"Don’t worry, Dad," Kanani says, but if there was something to follow, she does not finish.

"Thank you," he says instead, but he does not look down.  _The first waterbenders learned their arts from the moon and ocean spirits_ —for his daughter, one has a special lesson.


End file.
